Saturday, November 25, 2017

Remember Enoch Opeyemi Who Claimed to have Solved the Riemann Hypothesis?

Two years ago, a certain Dr. Enoch Opeyemi who teaches
mathematics at the Federal University in Oye-Ekiti suckered the Nigerian and
British media into believing that he had solved the 156-year-old Riemann
Hypothesis and would earn the $1 million prize for this "feat" from the US-based
Clay Mathematics Institute.

In my November 21, 2015 column titled, “'Mathematical' Enoch Opeyemi and the Making of Another Nigerian Intellectual 419er,” I pointed out
that Opeyemi’s claims didn’t stand up to scrutiny. “The moment I read about Dr.
Enoch Opeyemi's claim to have solved the 156-year-old Riemann Hypothesis in the
Vanguard of November 15, 2015, I didn't need to read a second opinion to know
it was suspect at best and fraudulent at worst,” I wrote.

Certain credulous Nigerians attacked me for this. The more
reasonable ones among them said since the Clay Mathematics Institute said it would
reward any claim to have solved the hypothesis only if such a claim is
published in a reputable mathematical journal and remains unchallenged in the
mathematical scholarly community for two years, I should wait two years before
pronouncing Opeyemi a delusional scammer.

Well, I have waited two years. I checked the website of the
Clay Mathematics Institute, and the Riemann Hypothesis that Opeyemi claimed to
have solved two years ago is still listed as “unsolved.”
So, clearly, Opeyemi fooled the Nigerian and British media who in turn fooled
the world. Some of us who saw through the chicanery and pointed it out were
called cynical, negative, hypercritical, and even accused of being jealous of a
high-achieving Nigerian scholar.

When Opeyemi’s claims invited a critical mass of scrutiny
from sundry scholars and commentators, he chose to grant a TV interview to a popular Nigerian pastor by the name of Sunday Adelaja.
During the interview, Opeyemi made even more ridiculous claims that, frankly,
call his very sanity into question.

A Yale University PhD student in mathematics, for instance,
was particularly clinical in tearing Opeyemi’s claims to shreds. In his attempt
to undermine the Yale University PhD student during the TV interview, Opeyemi
said PhD students don't publish in scholarly outlets until they have defended
their doctoral dissertations, and that his challenger wasn’t worthy of any
attention.

It takes unusual ignorance for a person who supposedly has a
PhD to make that kind of outrageously fallacious claim. In many PhD programs in
the US students are not allowed to graduate until they have published in
well-regarded academic journals. This is especially true of the hard sciences.

It also turned out that Opeyemi plagiarized a paper on the Riemann
Hypothesis and uploaded it onto his academia.edu page. (It isn’t clear if it was
the plagiarized paper he presented as his “solution” to the Riemann Hypothesis).
When Adelaja asked him about this, his defense was that the plagiarized paper
on his academia.edu page was uploaded by someone who hacked into his account! But
the plagiarized paper had been on his academia.edu page months before he
attracted attention to himself through his false, ridiculous claims.

I am dredging up this issue for two related reasons. One, we
tend to be amnesic, and because we’re amnesic we continually fall victim to the
same cheap scam tactics. To rejig the memories of people who forgot about this
issue, here is an abridged version of my November 21, 2015 column:

Now, Opeyemi’s only evidence for claiming to have solved the
Riemann Hypothesis was that he presented a paper on the puzzle at the
International Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science in Vienna,
Austria.

Well, it has turned out that the conference itself may be a
borderline scam operation. An August 20, 2011 blog post titled “Fake Paper
Accepted by Nina Ringo's Vienna Conference” revealed that a scientist by the
name of Mohammad Homayoun who was suspicious of the genuineness of the
International Conference on Mathematics and Computer Science (ICMC) decided to
test his suspicion by submitting a fake, worthless, nonsensical paper to the
conference to see if it would be accepted or rejected.

The researcher’s hunch was accurate: the ICMC in Vienna
appears to be an elaborate, money-making scholarly scam. His paper was accepted
even though it was intentionally nonsensical. “The conference claims that
submissions/papers are reviewed/refereed BUT they are not,” the researcher
wrote. “A fake paper was submitted for evaluation to intercomp2011@gmail.com on
Sun, Jan 2, 2011. The notification of acceptance was received on Sun, Jan 9,
2011.” That’s just one week of “peer review.”

But even if the conference were genuine, and it could very
well be, you can't prove something as momentous as a 156-year-old mathematical
problem with a mere conference presentation. In the rituals of knowledge
production in academe, for any claim to be taken seriously, it has to be
published in a well-regarded, peer-reviewed outlet, such as a journal. This is
elementary knowledge…

My sense is that Dr.
Opeyemi genuinely fancies himself as having solved this mathematical puzzle,
and his self-construal of his intellectual machismo got a boost when his paper
got accepted for presentation at a conference in Vienna, Austria. In the now
rampant xenophilic academic culture in Nigeria that uncritically valorizes the
foreign, for one's paper to be accepted at an "international" (read:
white) academic conference is seen as an endorsement of one's peerless
scholarly prowess.

Never mind that many of these “international” conferences
and journals are actually fraudulent.

When naive xenophilia seamlessly commingles with the kind of
mortifyingly cringe-worthy credulity that pervades the Nigerian media landscape
AND the progressive dearth and death of basic fact-checking in even
international media outlets like the BBC, you end up with embarrassing stories
like this.

This is not the first time this has happened. In July 2011,
another Nigerian academic by the name of Michael Atovigba claimed to have
solved the same Riemann Hypothesis. The ever so gullible Nigerian media
believed and celebrated him. The reason Atovigba convinced himself that he had
solved the mathematical puzzle that Opeyemi now also claims to have solved was
that his paper (which has only seven references, four of which are from
Wikipedia!) was found “worthy” of publication in an "international"
journal, which turned out to be a notoriously worthless, predatory,
bait-and-switch Pakistan-based journal that masquerades as a UK journal….

Atovigba told the (Nigerian) Guardian that he would get his
$1 million reward from the Clay Mathematics Institute now that he had published
his “proof” in a “reputable international journal.” Four years after, another
deluded Nigerian “scientist” claims to have proved the same hypothesis for
which Atovigba is still expecting his $1 million, and the media’s legendary
amnesia ensures that these clowns continue to expose Nigeria and Nigerians to
international ridicule. Incredible!

What is even more incredible is that a Nigerian BBC
correspondent’s story on Opeyemi, inspired by Vanguard’s initial reporting
(which was itself instigated by Opeyemi himself), has caused the British media
to perpetrate Opeyemi’s misrepresentation. Now, the British media’s uncritical
echoing of Opeyemi’s initial lie is invoked as evidence to lend credibility to
his claims to a non-existent feat. It has become one labyrinthine network of
tortuous, self-reinforcing falsehoods. Only Philip Emeagwali’s carefully packaged
fraud outrivals this.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.